Have you ever watched a science fiction movie, let’s say Species, where there was a scene where something came out of a test tube and ended up covering the room in an instant? You know, like maybe a couple of grams in the tube, which breaks on the floor releasing the thing that grows into a couple of hundred kilograms of alien badness before the incineration system takes it out. And have you ever asked yourself where the biomass came from in a room full of machinery, with we hope not too much in the way of humidity (which is bad for the equipment), with nothing to eat but the two humans who were in protective suits in the room? And they didn’t look like they had lost any weight during the creature’s growth. So just where does all that extra mass come from. I’m sure there are a lot of young men out there trying to gain weight for football who would like to know the answer to that one. After all, they’re trying desperately to put on a few pounds a week, so they won’t be broken in half by the real blue chippers on the field. And here’s a creature that seems to inhale mass from out of nowhere. Something similar happens in Alien, where a small creature bursts out of the chest of its host after maybe taking in a couple of kilograms of nourishment. It runs away and is later found at larger than human size after having eaten, as far as we know, nothing, except maybe some emergency rations in a locker somewhere. And the alien has some really different protein structures in its body, as shown by the almost universal acid if bleeds, and the cellular structure to hold in that acid. Meaning? That it must have a hell of a metabolism to change proteins so radically. Now the blob does a better job of showing where the mass for its growth is coming from. After all, the damned protoplasmic creature (which is probably impossible for other reasons that are not the focus of this blog entry) eats voraciously. In fact, its eats everything it can get its body around. But again, it must have some kind of metabolism to change proteins, haul its heavy ass around, and do other kinds of blob like stuff. We know that most meat eaters on our world might get a tenth of the food they eat to convert to body mass. The rest is burned up to run the metabolism. And even if the blob is cold, with a lower metabolism, it still couldn’t do better than one third of its food into body mass, now could it?
Now in fantasy there is really no need to explain the mechanism. It’s magic after all. Dragons turn into people and back to dragons and we don’t know where the mass goes to. Another dimension, a dragon cupboard in the kitchen, it don’t matter, because it’s magic. Same as Bruce Banner turning from a hundred fifty pound man to the ton of Hulk. But it would be nice if science fiction, which is supposed to be based in some way, shape or form on science after all, either gave an explanation for the inexplicable, or toned it down so that some semblance of reality was achieved. At least for those of us who give a damn.

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2 comments on “Where Does the Damned Mass Come From?”

It … ummmm … it pulls in matter fromm … ummmm … an alternate dimension through an nanotech-created vortex in the quantum foaminess of multidimensional n-spacetime and lays it down on a non-linear matricial 5-dimensional pattern determined by ur-information embedded into the terminal singularity of the Big Crunch and transmitted “backward” across time by means of a technology which we are too backwards and undeveloped to understand.